1 - Gordon Barclay: A Career in the Scottish Neolithic

Summary

Gordon Barclay (Figure 1.1), as many readers of this chapter will know, is a man of many interests and several passions. He spent most of his professional career in the service of archaeology within, latterly, the Scottish Government, and before that in a raft of state bodies and agencies of the Scottish Executive, and before that the Scottish Office all the way back to the old Department of the Environment of the mid-1970s. This contribution will, in keeping with the central concerns of the chapters by his friends and colleagues that are offered to him in the present volume, focus on ‘early farmer’ Gordon, as opposed to his other personas, although some of these will nonetheless, I am sure, emerge in this chapter, for several of them cross-cut with his Neolithic interests. My only qualifications for taking on this task are that I have known Gordon throughout his professional career, that I too am a lowland, east coast Scot who shares some of his mind-set, but also because I was the supervisor of Gordon's Edinburgh PhD thesis, submitted in 2001 and entitled The First Farmers: The Neolithic of East- Central Scotland. This was a doctorate awarded according to the Edinburgh rules on the basis of an extended justificatory essay setting his key research publications (over the ten years preceding 2000) on the Scottish Neolithic into wider context. It was – and readers who know the author will not be surprised to hear this – among the least troublesome theses I have ever been called on to oversee, with, in a reversal of what often happens, the supervisor being chivvied from time to time by the supervisee to hurry the administrative and other processes along. I hope the foregoing comments, however, will suffice to explain why a later prehistoric impostor pens these words. It is appropriate to note here that Gordon had intended since the early part of his professional career in the 1980s to undertake research as a part-time student with a view to submitting a doctoral dissertation on a cognate topic – initially the Neolithic of Perthshire – but had been stymied, despite the encouragement of Iain MacIvor, the then Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments by – in Gordon's view – lukewarm, nay tepid, official support thereafter within the civil service.